Innovators gear up work on ‘green’ hydrogen plane with plans for nonstop 9-day trip around Earth – AP

Innovators gear up work on ‘green’ hydrogen plane with plans for nonstop 9-day trip around Earth – AP

LES SABLES D’OLONNE, France (AP) — When aviation pioneer Bertrand Piccard a decade ago spearheaded a much-hyped flight around the world in a plane powered by sunlight, it raised awareness about climate change but held little promise of revolutionizing air travel.

Now, the 66-year-old Swiss adventurer behind Solar Impulse is aiming higher, in hopes of heading toward greener commercial flight than that of fossil fuel-powered planes today — this time using super-cold liquid hydrogen.

From a workshop on France’s Atlantic coast, Piccard and partners are ramping up Climate Impulse, a project started last February to fly a two-seater plane around the globe nonstop over nine days fueled by what’s known as green hydrogen. That’s hydrogen split out of water molecules using renewable electricity through a process called electrolysis.

The Climate Impulse team, whose backers include Airbus and a science incubator called Syensqo (pronounced “science-co”) born from Belgian pharmaceuticals company Solvay, presented its first-year progress to reporters Thursday in Les Sables d’Olonne, an oceanside town better known as host to the Vendee Globe round-the-world sailing race.

First test flights are planned next year, but the grueling round-the-world trip is set for 2028. Made with lightweight composites, the plane is dependent on several untested innovations and is far from a sure bet.

Piccard says a major airplane manufacturer wouldn’t take on the risk of producing a prototype such as Climate Impulse in case it fails.

He said in an interview,

It’s my job to be a pioneer,

“We have to show it’s possible, then it’s a big incentive for the others to continue.”

Even if the project is successful, experts say green hydrogen-powered flight on a commercial scale would be decades away at best. The project has lured tens of millions of euros of investment, and the team of dozens of staffers is growing.

The solar-powered plane was a technological feat in 2015, but wasn’t scalable, said Climate Impulse engineer and co-pilot Raphael Dinelli. Limited in range, that plane had to make more than a dozen stops on its trip around the world.

Climate Impulse is supposed to take off unassisted, fly some 40,000 kilometers (about 25,000 miles) around Earth along the Equator and return to its starting point with no mid-air refueling — and with no stops at all.

The controlled release of liquid hydrogen from ultra-insulated tanks under the airplane’s wings produces energy that seeps into the membrane of a fuel cell that powers the plane.

Piccard said Thursday,

The plane has the wingspan of an Airbus 320: 34 meters (about 110 feet). It weighs 5-1/2 tons and it flies at 180 kilometers per hour — that means 100 knots at 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) altitude,

One aim is to draw on energy from the “turbulence section” of the atmosphere, which airlines could also use one day to help save fuel, he said.

Because it’s hydrogen, the only emissions will be water vapor. Still, outside experts caution that the environmental impact of such water-vapor “contrails” remains unknown in a real-world or large-scale scenario.

The International Energy Agency says air travel is responsible for about 2% of global emissions of carbon dioxide.

Hydrogen has been used in flights for decades but as a gas, not a liquid. Use of liquid hydrogen will take time to scale up. Fossil fuels, which are cheaper and more efficient, still produce most hydrogen today.

Many governments want to produce more green hydrogen, but for now, the world can’t make enough clean electricity for power needs on land, let alone to generate enough for wide-scale use by planes in the air.

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